Looks like Cochran has a tiny lead, which kind of lets you know how truly fucked up Mississippi is these days.
Election 2014
Don’t Fuck This Up, Crist
A Democrat, and Independent and a Republican walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll you have, Charlie Crist?”
— A joke making the rounds in Florida
The ambulatory dildo who is the current Florida governor, Rick Scott, has launched an ad blitz featuring TV as well as Internet spots. I had to quit TPM last week because I couldn’t read the site without accidentally launching a video in which Scott pops out from behind a newspaper and pretends to be a human being who cares about college tuition, droning on in an adenoidal voice about that and other alleged human concerns.
Scott is a cartoonish villain with sub-chlamydia popularity numbers, so it was widely believed that anyone who could fog a mirror would beat him when he stands for reelection this year, despite his Scrooge McDuck-like cash vault full of stolen Medicare loot. Scott’s election was a bit of a fluke in the first place: He won in the teaturd wave election year of 2010 when the ever-moribund FL Democratic Party was dumb enough to run a former Bank of America executive.
Crist was our widely popular, moderate Republican governor who left office to run for an open US Senate seat as a Republican. He got beat in the primary by ambulatory haircut Marco Rubio and then ran as an Independent. The haircut won and is currently our Senate embarrassment. Now Crist is running for his old job again, this time as a Democrat.
Some of us FL Dems originally wanted to seize the opportunity of Scott’s massive unpopularity to run an actual Democrat for governor. Others felt that Crist’s popularity and name recognition gave us the best chance to put Scott away, and he is acceptable to most Dems since he’s not a bad guy, just an opportunist. And at first, that latter position seemed to be borne out as poll after poll showed Crist crushing Scott.
Now, Crist and Scott are pretty much even [WARNING: HUFFPO LINK]. That could be just the effect of the money Scott is pouring into the race. Or it could be Crist’s announcement that he wants to end the embargo against Cuba (yay!) and would be visiting the island this summer, which caused hard feelings in Miami. Now Crist has reversed himself on that, saying he won’t be sipping rum and smoking cigars in Havana this summer after all, a move that is being characterized as another flip-flop.
Crist will almost certainly crush Nan Rich, the Democrat who will oppose him in the primary this summer, unless he convinces Florida Dems that he’s even more of a weathercock than we imagined. I’m lukewarm on Crist, but I hate Scott with the radiant intensity of 10,000 supernovae. So don’t fuck this up, Crist.
Are There No Fire Hoses? Are There No Police Dogs?
Things continue to be interesting in Mississippi. Here’s Dave Weigel, earlier Monday:
Mississippi’s extra-innings Senate primary ends [Tuesday], and Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Theodore Schleifer report that a collection of conservative groups will be sending in poll-watchers. FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and the Senate Conservatives Fund will team up for the unprecedented, single-minded effort to beat Sen. Thad Cochran…
But this second push to control the electorate is more dramatic than the Times lets on. The paper quotes Senate Conservatives Fund President Ken Cuccinelli in saying, accurately, that voters who drew a Democratic ballot three weeks ago can’t vote in the Republican primary tomorrow. True. But Adams, quoted in the Times piece, told Breibart.com’s embedded reporter Matt Boyle that it would be illegal for a voter who intended to vote against the winner of the GOP primary to cast a ballot at all…
Given that more than 90 percent of Mississippi’s black voters usually vote Democratic, poll-watchers have an easy way of spotting interlopers. Hey, you, picking up the Republican ballot! Do you plan to vote for the winner of the Republican primary?…
Weigel reports there is informed disagreement with the Conservatives’ interpretation, but I don’t see that discouraging Chris McDaniels’ Tea Party supporters from providing some ugly optics “challenging” voters they suspect might be Democrats. (Not, I suspect, that any African-American voters in Mississippi would expect anything better from the GOP… )
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Open Thread: The Outreach Continues!
(via Crooks&Liars)
In possibly the Slate-iest #slatepitch of all time, Jamelle Bouie urges African-American voters in Mississipi to come out on Tuesday for… Thad Cochrane:
If the status quo holds, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran will lose his seat to Chris McDaniel, the upstart Tea Party Republican who pushed the longtime senator into a run-off election. And so, rather than persuade McDaniel’s supporters, Team Cochran is trying to change the status quo by appealing to a new class of voters: African Americans…
Because there’s no party registration in Mississippi, anyone can vote in the Republican primary, as long as they didn’t vote in the Democratic one. And, as Philip Bump notes for the Washington Post, turnout for the Democratic primary was substantially lower than that of the Republican one. Which means there’s an ample population of black voters who could give Cochran the edge he needs to win…
Indeed, if there was a time to support Cochran, now is it. A Thad Cochran who owes his next—and probably final—term to black support is a Thad Cochran who might work to secure their interests in the Senate. It’s possible that Cochran could win with black voters and ignore them afterwards. But I doubt it. Politicians tend to respond to key constituencies, and black voters will be in a good spot if they can extract concessions from Cochran in return for their support, and he goes on to win. It’s nakedly transactional, yes, but it’s much better than trying to deal with an ideologue who draws his support from the most anti-government voters in the state.
Which is a long way of saying that, if I were voting in Mississippi, I’d swallow my partisanship and cast a ballot for Thad Cochran. He’s not a great choice, but given the circumstances, he’s probably the best one.
Martin Longman, at the Washington Monthly, notes that the Mississippi GOP has some… issues with this argument:
… Whatever its risks, the Cochran strategy is creating some tactical problems for Chris McDaniel’s campaign. There’s no party registration in Mississippi, so there’s nothing illegal about asking anyone to vote in your runoff, so long as they didn’t first participate in the other party’s first round. McDaniels supporters are trying to invoke a vague “loyalty oath” kind law passed by Democrats to prevent Republican tactical voting, but it’s entirely unenforceable…
So exactly what it is about these voters that makes their participation in the runoff so outrageous? It can’t be their race, of course, so it’s gotta be ideology!…
Republican state senator Angela Hill got close to candor in a quote supplied to Breitbart:
“The Republican Party has never been the food stamp party, or the party of pork until desperation set in with Thad Cochran’s re-election bid,” Hill said. “I have never seen such open collaboration to get Democrats to spoil a Republican party primary or runoff as is being openly displayed by Thad Cochran operatives in the MS GOP establishment.”
I guess Republicans could start administering lie detector tests at the polls and just ask every prospective voter if he or she is a true conservative, which seems to be the implicit qualification here. Otherwise, the argument will be about keeping black folks away from the ballot box, which is of course the oldest of traditions in Mississippi.
A las Barricadas
National Journal blind squirrel Ron Fournier may have stumbled over an acorn today while seeking explanations for Eric Cantor’s tsunami-earthquake-sharknado primary loss:
But what may be in the air is a peaceful populist revolt—a bottom-up, tech-fueled assault on 20th-century political institutions…In Washington, Cantor’s defeat is being chalked up to the tea party’s intolerance toward immigration reform…. While he paid a price for flirting with a White House compromise, Cantor’s greater sin was inauthenticity—brazenly flip-flopping on the issue. Typical politician. Worse, voters sensed that Cantor was more interested in becoming House speaker than in representing their interests. He spent more money at steakhouses than rival David Brat spent on his entire campaign. Typical politician.
Fournier goes on to crib ideas from a 2013 memo from a former Clinton White House political flak, Doug Sosnik, who cites “an increasing populist push” from left to right. Fournier writes:
Which side of the barricade are you on? Populists from the right and the left—from the tea party and libertarian-leaning Rand Paul to economic populist Elizabeth Warren—are positioning themselves among the insurgents. Sosnik pointed to six areas of consensus that eventually may unite the divergent populist forces:
— A pullback from the rest of the world, with more of an inward focus.
— A desire to go after big banks and other large financial institutions.
— Elimination of corporate welfare.
— Reducing special deals for the rich.
— Pushing back on the violation of the public’s privacy by the government and big business.
— Reducing the size of government.
Much of this strikes me as “No Labels” pablum. Does anyone seriously believe Rand Paul wants to eliminate corporate welfare and quit rigging the game for the rich? Does anyone think Elizabeth Warren wants to slash the size of an already decimated public sector? Hogwash.
But a much smarter person than Ron Fournier detects a whiff of populism in the electorate too: Here’s Balloon Juice colleague Kay from one of the Cantor grave-dancing threads the other day:
Voters said Cantor was “out of touch” and that’s a problem for both Republicans and Democrats, IMO. I hear “out of touch” more often than I hear any specific complaint. There’s a real populist shift on both sides, I think.
The Tea Party’s will be horrible and xenophobic but the Democrats need to address it, develop a liberal version, or conservatives will run away with the whole concept. I think it’s real.
I think she’s right. As the only one of the two viable political parties in this country that is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the 1%, Democrats should benefit from a populist groundswell, but only if they recognize and channel it.
From President Obama down, many have addressed the income inequality issue and the basic unfairness of how the game is rigged right now, thanks to GOP policies. That’s a message every damn one of them needs to be shouting from the rooftops for the next two years.
A win on voting rights
In May, the Democratic National Committee and Ohio Democratic Party asked the U.S. Southern District Court to make permanent a 2012 ruling that county boards of election must allow early, in-person voting on the Saturday, Sunday and Monday before Election Day.
The summary judgment issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Peter C. Economus orders Husted to set business hours for the three days prior to Election Day “to preserve the right of all Ohio voters to cast his or her vote with said hours to be uniform throughout the State and suitable to the needs of the particular election in question.”
The Obama Campaign sued Husted and the state of Ohio in 2012, alleging the change violated Ohioans rights to participate equally in elections. The courts sided with the plaintiffs, concluding it was wrong to treat some voters (non-military) different than others (military). The Ohio Supreme Court rejected a request for an emergency stay, and Husted released new hours including the weekend voting days.
The 2012 case remained open and Wednesday’s summary judgment makes the ruling permanent.
You all remember Judge Economus from the 2012 election. He doesn’t fool around:
A federal judge ordered Secretary of State Jon Husted on Wednesday to personally appear next week at a hearing about his reluctance to restore early voting the weekend before the Nov. 6 election.
Mr. Husted was reluctant. It just didn’t feel right to him to follow that order in 2012. He did, eventually, comply with the order and today makes that 2012 order permanent – unless Republicans change the voting laws again which they probably will.
Early voting is convenient and people really like it and it makes for better election administration because it takes some of the crush off election day. That’s also why Republicans oppose it.
Don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde
Maybe it’s wrong to read too much into this, but there’s been only one surprising upset in the Republican primaries and….
Eric Cantor is the only Jewish member of the GOP House caucus.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 10, 2014
No Jewish Republican Senators either, btw.
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